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. 2022 Aug 4;23(15):8696.
doi: 10.3390/ijms23158696.

Gene Variants Related to Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Diseases May Correlate with Severe Outcome of COVID-19

Mateusz Sypniewski  1 , Zbigniew J Król  2 , Joanna Szyda  3   4 , Elżbieta Kaja  5 , Magdalena Mroczek  6 , Tomasz Suchocki  3   4 , Adrian Lejman  7 , Maria Stępień  8 , Piotr Topolski  2 , Maciej Dąbrowski  7 , Krzysztof Kotlarz  3 , Angelika Aplas  2 , Michał Wasiak  2 , Marzena Wojtaszewska  9 , Paweł Zawadzki  7 , Agnieszka Pawlak  2 , Robert Gil  2 , Paula Dobosz  2 , Joanna Stojak  2
Affiliations

Gene Variants Related to Cardiovascular and Pulmonary Diseases May Correlate with Severe Outcome of COVID-19

Mateusz Sypniewski et al. Int J Mol Sci. .

Abstract

Background: Severe outcomes of COVID-19 account for up to 15% of all cases. The study aims to check if any gene variants related to cardiovascular (CVD) and pulmonary diseases (PD) are correlated with a severe outcome of COVID-19 in a Polish cohort of COVID-19 patients. Methods: In this study, a subset of 747 samples from unrelated individuals collected across Poland in 2020 and 2021 was used and whole-genome sequencing was performed. Results: The GWAS analysis of SNPs and short indels located in genes related to CVD identified one variant significant in COVID-19 severe outcome in the HADHA gene, while for the PD gene panel, we found two significant variants in the DRC1 gene. In this study, both potentially protective and risk variants were identified, of which variants in the HADHA gene deserve the most attention. Conclusions: This is the first study reporting the association between the HADHA and DRC1 genetic variants and COVID-19 severe outcome based on the cohort WGS analysis. Although all the identified variants are localised in introns, they may be correlated and therefore inherited along with other risk variants, potentially causative to severe outcome of COVID-19 but not discovered yet.

Keywords: COVID-19; GWAS; cardiovascular diseases; genetic variants; pulmonary diseases; risk factors; single nucleotide polymorphism.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Manhattan plot of p-values for variants from the panel of genes associated with cardiovascular diseases and severe COVID-19 outcome. The dashed line marks the threshold for Bonferroni correction at α = 0.05, the dotted line marks FDR threshold < 0.1.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Manhattan plot of p-values for variants from the panel of genes associated with pulmonary diseases and associated with COVID-19 severity. The dashed line marks the threshold for Bonferroni correction at α = 0.05, the dotted line marks FDR threshold < 0.1.
Figure 3
Figure 3
PCA plot of first two principal components of genomic relationship matrix for analysed variants.
Figure 4
Figure 4
QQ-plot of p-values for cardiovascular panel. The gray shaded area indicates the 95% confidence interval under the null.
Figure 5
Figure 5
QQ-plot of p-values for pulmonary panel. The gray shaded area indicates the 95% confidence interval under the null.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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